“The meaning construal of verbs of report: the case of English maintain”

The goal of the paper is to highlight the ways in which contextual information determines the emergence of the reporting function of the verb maintain from its meaning potential. The study is carried out through the exploration of the linguistic context as represented by word patterns such as verb-adverbs and verb-connectives. After discussing relevant approaches in the literature, the paper focuses on a cognition-based approch of framing/profiling as meaning construal complemented with a pragamtico-semiotic perspective (Sbisà, 1989).